Trying to migrate to open source software is not difficult at all, now there is much Free/open source software available, neither you decide to fully migrate by using open source operation system like Linux or staying on your current OS either it is windows or Mac OSX.
Free/Open source software can strongly compete with proprietary software to facilitate users daily tasks and needs from their computers and save their money too.
Contents
- Web Browsing
Starting from surfing the internet, there are many open source web browsers such as Mozilla FireFox, Opera, the lesser-known browser "Midori" and Chromium which is an open-source version of Chrome.
- Office Suites
Users also can find a powerful open source office suites working as an alternative without any notable differences to Microsoft office, like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Both suites embed several applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and managing databases.
- Playing Media
They also can depend on one open source media player software to watch all their lovable videos, as VLC media player can play almost all common formats of videos without problems, and they can setup Audacious for playing their music how they want it, without stealing away they computer’s resources from other tasks.
- E-Mailing
As watching a video with VLC media player is easy and effortless to install and play; Managing inboxes much easier with using open source software E-Mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Zimbra, they both support almost all of the e-mail providers.
- Image Editing & Graphics tools
Designers and users who want to add a magic touch to their images and photos can also depend on open source software, there is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is a free alternative to proprietary image processing and editing programs. There is also Inkscape which is an editing vector graphics software, very good and free alternative to costly programs like corelDraw and Adobe illustrator.
Others notable open source graphic programs are “FreeCAD” which is a parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size, “Blender” suite for really big 3D creation projects and “Draw” tool in LibreOffice suite for simple graphics, diagrams and charts.
- Other Tasks
There are more and more open source programs to depend on; CamStudio to record your computer screen and save the results as AVI or SWF files, Pidgin to connects multiple chat networks and Cdex to CD ripping.